Blog Entry #3

1. Why do you think evaluation of CALL courseware, websites, materials etc important?

Personally, if I were about to purchase something, I might consider several aspects that somehow need to be evaluated based on my needs and is it relevant enough for me to use it over and over again? This same goes to CALL courseware, websites, materials and others which I think these three privileges may vary from one another and it keeps on changing from time to time. Looking at the education field itself, both teachers and students can benefit a lot through evaluation as for the teachers, they might know that somehow certain courseware, websites as well as materials are based on situation-specific argument. Perhaps, it might work to use the courseware as their teaching aids only for this year and who knows, it might be otherwise for next year. Furthermore, the types of students, their learning needs and how are they going to utilize it may also differ from one student to another and this should be taken into consideration as well.

As for the students, they might want something that can somehow benefit them as they choose certain websites that can give extra input generally and at the same time play important roles as tools for them to learn the language specifically. Perhaps, they can always adapt with coursewares that can give positive impact as well as practical enough for them to use it in future time.




2. How do you think Hot Potatoes JCloze may help your students learn English?

I would personally agree that Hot Potatoes JCloze can really help students to be independent learners as this will engage their participation to become more creative with the answers because they will be given clues in order to answer the questions. Thus, the learning will become much more towards the autonomous learning by focusing specifically to the language used. The features involved in this Hot Potatoes will definitely encourage the students to be involved in the learning process as hands-on activity will be involuntarily involved in the learning process rather than the traditional way of learning. As a matter of fact, Hot Potatoes also serves as drills and promote students' understanding in the context of language learning. Moreover, Hot Potatoes JCloze enables students to receive immediate feedback and on top of that, after the questions have been answered, there are percentage that will somehow allow the students to be aware of their capability of the subject matter.

In a sense of the physical aspect, for sure Hot Potatoes will be less time consuming as this will promote the teachers to prepare tons of exercises for the students without extra "burden" to photocopy these exercises. Furthermore, the colours and the pictures will then attract students' interest to do the exercises without so much tense. Overall, Hot Potatoes JCloze will definitely give vast impact to the students' needs for language learning purposes.